Tag Archives: land loss

A senior U.N. official says that loss of farmland poses a major threat to China’s ability to be self-sufficient in grain. The warning comes from Olivier De Schutter, the U.N. Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur on the right to food, in a preliminary report based on a visit to China in December. De Schutter writes:

Since 1997, China has lost 8.2 million hectares of arable land due to urbanization, forest and grassland replanting programmes, and damage caused by natural disasters, and the country’s per capita available land is now at 0.092 hectares, 40 per cent of the world average. This shrinking of arable land represents a major threat to the ability of China to maintain its current self-sufficiency in grain. China has adopted the principle according to which any cultivated land lost for other purposes should be reclaimed elsewhere, and it has set a “red line” at 1.8 billion mu (120 million hectares) beyond which arable land will not be allowed to shrink further. But China is already dangerously close to this limit.

De Schutter also highlights the issue of drought:

Water scarcity is a huge problem: per capita water availability is less than one third the world average. According to one estimate, climate change may cause agricultural productivity to drop by 5 to 10 per cent by 2030 in the absence of mitigation actions, affecting principally wheat, rice and maize. Indeed, already today, droughts affect between 200 and 600 million mu of farmland in China every year.

De Schutter recognizes the progress Beijing has made in improving food security, but says more needs to done to improve living conditions in rural areas, to improve the security of land tenure and to move to more sustainable farming. All these are challenges that Beijing acknowledges it faces, though that makes addressing them none the less urgent.